The White Lady

by Brett Rutherford

Part Four of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

And now I turn, and facing me,
the polar opposite of the old invader
and his dragon visage, there stands
tall as an oak, The White Lady.

I see, again, the black-hued rats,
how dark they clot the landscape,
blotting with sable hues the fields of wheat,
spoiling the grape, and the apple harvest.

She sings with flute-like tone, “Away! Away!”
The rats stop. She waves her hand
toward the River Tyne below, to where
the rich groom’s yacht
     has shouldered out the fisher-boats.

“Away! Away!” she cries,
and the rats surge up below us,
flooding the gangplank to vanish
into the yacht’s interior. As fast
as they had come, the dark wave
of pestilence thins out, is gone.
Packed they must be in every inch
of space below the decks, all but
invisible steerage passengers,
bound like their predecessor rodents
to teeming Manhattan. “Away! Away!”
she sings again, and all
are gone and still.

                                I swoon at this,
and without knowing how, I find myself
again in the company of one
whose feet are lily-pads, who then
returned me to the wedding hall.

The bride is lovely. None seem
to notice that her pristine gown
is made entirely of small, white mice.
The groom’s cloak seems full
of raven wings and clinging martlets.
Beaks, snouts, and claws reach out
at wedding cake and goblets.
All is as planned, and as my
crisply engraved invite presaged.
Guests come in the guise of animals.
As merry it is as a Furry convention.
Though no one is drunk, the dancing
grows more and more wild as sun
sinks and a silver moon rises.

Who said that Northumberland is stern,
has never been to a Robson-Rutherford Wedding!

 

 

March 3, 2023, from a preceding night’s dream.

Lord Rutherford's Castle

 

by Brett Rutherford

Part Three of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

As crowds flow past and into the banquet hall,
I find myself alone. The barred door
of the castle keep, bronze studded with iron,
forbids my passage. I knock
my umbrella against its dark shielding.
A hollow booming echoes back — I dread
that Lord Rutherford, my cousin drear,
as much averse to weddings as to funerals,
will come running in his bathrobe,
or that some chain-mailed retainer
will pull the vast door ajar and menace
me with the very sword we brought
into this land from Flanders. But no,
my knock presumptuous just fades away.

I spy a lesser door, and stones
whose curious hand-holds pose
a challenge like some Chinese puzzle box.
Somehow my hands know where
to put themselves. With ease,
one cornerstone pulls out; the door
on a spring’d hinge just opens itself,
and in and up I go. My feet
know when to tread, and where
exactly one must side-step so as
to miss a plummeting to brain-dash.
As quick as a rabbit racing, I find
myself at the castle’s high precipice,
standing on checkerboard flagstones.

A rude stone sculpture, crumbling
and eaten away by ivy, rears up,
half-man, half-dragon, but faces in,
as though to guard from eyes the view —

And what I see! Oh, words
for once have almost failed me.
A horizon high, impossibly so,
two rivers meeting, and on
its level island, white and gold,
three towers by time unchanged:

a cathedral as new as on the day
it was completed, rainbow-hued
as its multi-colored windows
gleam brighter than the sun
without; a great, good hall
to shelter the merchant arts and serve
workman, lords, scholars and clerks;
and higher than both, a castle
beyond the dream of fairy-tales
with trees and hanging gardens blessed,
a place of neither strife nor war.

Rats at the Wedding

 by Brett Rutherford

Part Two of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

I have come
for the Robson-Rutherford wedding.
The inn’s last room is mine,
secured by my distant-cousin status.
My room overlooks the Tyne.
The castle beyond is all a-stir,
the grand hall packed with visitors.

Yet the old keep and its twisted turret
is barred and closed.
     Lord Rutherford forbids
the tread of curious idlers
upon its steep unbannistered steps,
windows unpaned; uneven-floored
the crenellated tower-top is, where
one might plummet to the very dungeon.

I pass a train depot and shelter
whose sign points out
the way to London, Edinburgh,
Paris, and Rome, though no one
seems to come or go
by either train or autobus. Indeed,
a colony of wharf-rats, obscenely fat
have taken residence on every bench
and nest in piles of yellow ticket stubs.

“Don’t mind them,” Lady Robson advises.
“As she is marrying an American,
the silly creature, we’ve drawn the rats.
Off to New York they go, and not
a moment too soon for Northumberland.”
This is an elder lady’s fantasy, I guess.

How such a Pied-Piper feat could be
accomplished was beyond my figuring.

Assuredly the rats are here for cake,
like all the distant relatives come on
with smiling insincerity and gifts
(white elephants that rotate fete to fete).

Rats, rice, and diamonds, the stuff
of weddings since ancient times.

A Gift of Daffodils

 by Brett Rutherford

Part One of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

1.

A Gift of Daffodils

“I was given the gift of daffodils.” —
“How sad,” I say. “So brief a bloom
despite the glory they bring for a day.” —
“Come see,” the old one, smiling, says.

She puts her apron aside and rises,
strutting the cobblestones on spindly legs.
Her feet, I see, end not in shoes
but wide-spread lily pads. Duck feet
could not be more sure of tread
as she led me to the shaded wall
beneath St. Cuthbert’s church. There,
tiny narcissus-daffodils peeped up.
“That’s fine,” said I, “but in a week
the petals fade and fall. Yon rose
blooms over and over again. Mistress,
I shall gift you a bed of roses.” —

“Nay, sir, with daffodils I stay,
for what I plant here, blazons
above.” Just then, as I looked up,
the organ pealed in all its octaves
and light filled from within
the ancient, stained-glass window,
not a saints suffering, or Christ a-cross,
but an endless vista of gold
and white athwart green spears,
twenty feet high and every inch
a portrait of exploding daffodils.

The Headless Cross at Elsdon

by Brett Rutherford

     after a dirge by Robert Surtees

Her lover died at the Nine-Stone Rig

from seven brothers’ rage;

nine the arrows that shower’d down,

arms, heart, and throat, and eye

a-shiver with the hate-fletched shafts,

a-quake with their envenom’d darts,

a double death of blood and poison,

all this to avenge a virginity lost!

They shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig,

beside the cursèd cross of Thor

(false Dane who absolution shunned),

a fitting place to die.

They left him lying in his blood,

red on green moss, black on brown earth.

The fled and vowed to kill again

if her illicit union spawn’d.

A Lapland wind, a raven dark,

lapped at the blood and plucked the eye,

the one blue orb unarrow’d,

and brought it to the lady fair.

She fainted, for she knew that eye,

beneath which she had loved and sigh’d.

And then she summon’d her menials

to search the wet, cold ground for him.

They made a bier from broken boughs

of the birch and the aspen gray.

Nine arrows they broke and cast away

at the foot of the Headless Cross.

They bore him to Our Lady’s Chapel.

None dared to refuse his passing-in.

The lady arrived. Her servant brought

The azure eye in a silver chalice.

She placed the eye in the blacken’d hole

where once it had glistened and tear’d.

The other had but the stump of wood

where the unkindest dart of all

Had blinded him, and reft her soul.

They waked him there all day; by night

the tapers burned as monks and nuns

gave out heart-rending Requiems.

As they came at last to bear him off,

the lady threw her robes aside,

in favor of an ashen shift sleev’d

and collar’d with crimson and black.

With waters blessed from Our Lady’s well,

she bathed the corpse, and washed it clean

of the thrice-three poison’d wounds.

(Her wound only did she not regret).

She plaited a garland for on his breast,

and a garland for on his hair.

The raven upon her shoulder lit.

The Lapland wind made dark the room

As the tapers all flickered and died.

They rolled him in a winding sheet

     ah, lily-white it was! And as

the Virgin’s water had him blessed

No mark of blood appeared.

They bore him to a new-made grave,

and passing by the Chapel Garth

they paused to let the Gray Friars sing

in yet another Requiem. But where

would the lady bury her lover?

Not in the family crypt where bones

might still be ravaged by those

same seven brothers she now loathed!

Not in some crowded churchy ground

where twenty years hence they’d dig

and pile his bones with strangers’ skulls!

She chose the place, in dark of wood

where first they had met, o fatal spot!

a bower beneath a spreading beech.

In murk of midnight they buried him,

where the dew fell cold and still,

in windless fell of untrembling leaf

where the mists cling to the hill.

They dug his grave just a bare foot deep,

where she had happily laid with him:

see where the heather flower blooms,

and the moss and the lady-fern.

A Gray Frair stood upon that grave

and sang until the sun rose true,

another sings yet for the lover's soul

at the foot of the Headless Cross.

— Op. 1055 February 2, 2020.

Mysteries of Elsdon Churchyard

It was inevitable that I would finally write a poem about my ancestral home in Northumberland, the town of Elsdon, from my which great-great grandparents emigrated to Pennsylvania.

1

Why did the bell
of Elsdon Church
resound
across the landscape,

shaking the ground
of the tumulus mound
above the empty motte
of Elsdon Castle?

Why did the voice
of St. Cuthbert’s minister
echo deep mystery
in even a commonplace
sermon, bass-deep
from a voice that was
no lower than baritone?

Thank the medieval
architect who thrust
three horses’ skulls
upright into an oaken
cabinet,

a resonance box
suspended
within the bell-tower.

Bell above
thrice amplified below
and out across
the countryside;

preacher in pulpit
graced with the tone
of thunder-Jehovah.

2

Whose the stone
coffin that leans
against the wall

of St. Cuthbert’s?

No one can move it,
and no one knows
what sacred corpse
reclined within its hollow,
sculpted to human
silhouette.

Monks, it was said,
came here with relics
of St. Cuthbert,
in flight from the Vikings,

but who could flee
cross-country
with a stone sepulchre
and the eight horses
and cumbersome cart
it would take to haul
an entire saint
and his equipage?

No, this was not Cuthbert
whose tomb
rests finally in Durham,
but some unknown knight,
perhaps, who willed
himself a mighty coffin
where neither rat nor worm
could mar his godlike
features —

Yet what is left?
Lidless, leaning
against a wall
where dogs and derelicts
can lift a leg,

flesh, armor and bones
all gone, a hollow
in human outline,
no man and
Everyman.

3

Before Elli’s Valley
became “Elsdon,”
before the invading
Vikings,
before the Normans,
who built Elsdon Castle
before the Saxons,
guttering the Anglish
tongue, Romans
lived here and prospered,
secure in their reign
amid their household
and temple gods.

Here, against the unwilling
walls of Saint Cuthbert’s
a Roman gravestone.

To the divine Manes,

he of the prefect
of the first cohort
of the Augustan of the Lusitani,
also of the second cohort
of the Breuci, subcurator
of the Flaminian Way
and of the distribution
of maintenance,
subcurator of public works.

Julia Lucilla had this erected
to her husband well deserving.
He lived forty-eight years
six months and five days.

Pushed back southward
from the Antonine Wall
to Hadrian’s Wall, then out
of Britain altogether
as barbarians swarmed Europe,
Romans left only stones,
deep-buried lares and penates
beneath their houses,
the envied ruins
of colossal baths, the heads
and torsos of toppled gods.

Still, every English ghost
looks out to sea
for the dreaded Viking sails,
and treads lightly, lest
a Roman hand reach up
to seize its ankle.

Turn any stone
and a face looks up.